One year goes by fast!

Hello, dear followers and welcome to our one year anniversary week of BlogIONIK!

We are excited to celebrate the first birthday of BlogIONIK together with you throughout this week.

What is awating you?

A resumee of our first year and plans for the next one, personal video introductions of the BlogIONIK team, a quiz – so you can see for yourself how much you learned about Biomimetics from our articles – and some other surprises :-).

Thanks for your support!

Anja, Jan, Kathi & Waseem

Team BlogIONIK in July 2016

… but maybe you are here for the first time today ? Please read our revised ‚FAQ BlogIONIK‘ to find out what this blog is about!

FAQ BlogIONIK

The name of our blog combines two words: Blog & Bionik … and this is exactly what we are doing: blogging about Bionik! ‘Bionik’ itself is also a combination of two (german) words: Biologie & Technik – and what this actually means will also be discussed in this article. But before we go there, we have some more important points on our agenda: we would like to introduce ourselves to you and point out our motivations. Why is the field of Bionik worth blogging about? What can you actually read here? Kindly find a short ‘FAQ’ list below, which will hopefully give you some insights in what you can find on www.blogionik.org.

Who we are

If you have a glimpse at our introductions (Anja, Jan, Kathi, Waseem) you might find out that the four of us do not have very much in common in our vitas. Our only obvious link is the Master program ‘Bionik/ Biomimetics in Energy Systems’, which we all attended from 2012-2014 at the Carinthia University of Applied Sciences in Villach/ Austria. We came from different fields of science and from different stages in our lives to complement our education with the young, innovative and exciting subject of ‘Bionik/ Biomimetics’. Besides studying together for two years we got to know each other well, became friends and learned to cooperate and work together very efficiently (and to have fun doing it)! Therefore we decided to keep up our ‘work symbiosis‘ after finishing our studies in 2014 via this blog – a cooperative project of us to share and spread our ideas and thoughts about Biomimetics and infect you with our fascination of this subject!

What we do

What are we doing on BlogIONIK?

• Throughout our Master program we did numerous interesting projects to learn and apply new methodologies, to work on interesting subjects from different fields of science or to actually conduct a biomimetic research. But what happens now with all these interesting reports/ presentations/ essays? We are selecting our most successful and exciting topics and reconstruct them here in our articles, to get them out of the book shelf (or a rusty folder on an external hard drive) and make them public! Some popular examples are for example: Anja’s Master thesis about Papyrus & electrostatics, a  series of articles about a floating turbine by Jan, , an experimental design about wet adhesion mechanisms by Kathi or Waseem’s article about How bats see in the dark. All of these articles originate from our Master program and we are glad to be able to share them with you via this blog!
• All of us have different backgrounds (concerning our education, but also our culture and interests) and this is also reflected in our articles. You can recognize that each one of us has a different specialty and fields of interest and therefore we are providing a broad portfolio of topics from our individual know-how.
• We are presenting you interesting personalities in the field of Biomimetics via our interviews ’10 questions to….‘ (for example to Thomas Speck or Ille C. Gebeshuber).
• Via info articles – for example a collection of places to study Biomimetics in Europe or the presentation of a Biomimetic workshop – we are informing you for example about teaching in the field of Biomimetics.
• After finishing university in 2014, every one of us took a different path and gained new insights and experiences from new projects or work experiences. Without connecting this blog too much to our work live, these inputs  of our work are popping up in our articles.

How does our blog work?

As probably most of you can empathize – life can get quite busy and a blog is something which needs lots of care and time. To avoid neglecting our blog, we are a group of four people, provoding mostly one new article per week. We are always happy about getting into some interesting and lively discussions with you and therefore would like to encourage comments, criticism, feedback of any kind, request for explanations, clarifications, corrections or follow-up articles.

What is Bionik/ Biomimetics

‘Bionik’ (or English: Biomimetics) is a field of science, which has as a goal to analyse, understand and abstract a natural system/ object or technique to extract its principle and implement it in technology. Famous examples are ‘Velcro’ (inspired from limpets), the ‘Lotus effect’ or – as the most obvious example: designing planes or ships with the help of fish or bird shapes or structures. If you want to learn more basic facts about Biomimetics – we would like to refer to the homepages on the start site.

Hopefully we could give you an overview of what we doing on www.blogionik.org and maybe you got curious and will visit our blog from time to time.

See you around!

Anja, Jan, Kathi & Waseem